Congress Halts Vote Count as Pro-Trump Rioters Storm the Capitol
I’m betting on Democracy to prevail.
As protesters circled the House chamber, Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, yelled out to Republicans: “Call Trump, tell him to call off his revolutionary guards.”
This was the scene as pro-Trump rioters breached the Capitol, paraded up the stairs, broke windows, stormed past guards, and marched into the halls, halting the certification of the Electoral College vote. After breaking windows and entering the Senate, the President urged on Twitter to “stay peaceful.”
Too late.
According to The New York Times,
The entire Senate was hurried into the Capitol basement by uniformed police officers. Swarms of protesters roamed the halls, taking photos and breaking into offices. A man was smoking pot in a room where there were photos of mountains and maps of Oregon on the wall. A man put a framed photo of the Dalai Lama in his backpack. A man in a leather jacket ripped a scroll with Chinese characters.
Outside, people banged on the glass windows of the Capitol, breaking some panes. Crowds pressed past the front columns. People shouted at empty rooms inside with computer monitors on desks and empty chairs. “Yeah, look at all this fancy furniture they have!” said a man in a winter parka and red hat.”
This scene is a fitting end of Trump’s reality TV show presidency; it’s ending as it began, with derisive rhetoric urging on the uninformed to violence.
The Capitol breached, and guns were drawn on the Senate floor, as protesters riffled through offices and hung from the walls of the US Capitol — invaded by insurrectionists.
The protest didn’t come out of anywhere. The President has been urging his supporters to come to Washington today, promising it would “be wild.”
The breach of the building occurred after President Trump called on supporters at a rally in downtown Washington to march to the Capitol complex. The President said earlier; there will be a “march on the Capitol,” saying he would “march with protesters.”
Trump has managed to shut down the Congress of the United States, shitting all over the Constitution one more time before he is escorted out, kicking and screaming like the child he is.
This is the cost of Trump; we are witnessing it in real-time.
Trump has been stoking this for four-plus years with his inflammatory rhetoric. He does not want to stop it, which was evident in his recorded speech aired during the violent insurrection giving mixed messages again. He repeated the lies, “the election was stolen,” while telling them to “go home, we have to have peace.”
The peaceful transfer of power is one of the hallmarks of our Democracy, which includes the certification of the Electoral College, which Congress was set to vote on today. The halting of the certification and the assault on the Capitol is another blow to the rule of law and our nation’s most sacred undertaking, doing the people’s business — electing the next President.
Today, we saw the build-up from the last five years of lies and disinformation from Trump’s mouth spill onto the Capitol steps as if this were not the United States, but some other authoritarian country.
A few Republicans started to speak out during the insurrection, finally, but only when their lives were in danger.
When Rep. Mike Gallagher was on the phone with MSNBC about the riot, he said, “I really don’t get it?”
Katy Tur retorted, “Do you really not get it? This is the President that stoked this. He said an hour ago, ‘march on the Capitol. Go march down Pennsylvania Ave,’ this is inherently political.”
Domestic terrorists will not stop the process of Democracy.
While this breach on our Capitol was taking place, the AP News confirmed Democrats Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock were propelled to victory in their US Senate races giving Schumer 50 members of his caucus — the minimum needed to become majority leader.
I bet, before the end of the night, the Senate will rally and complete the business of certifying the election results confirming who the electors overwhelmingly voted for — President-elect Joe Biden.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering perfectionist. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
